The Hope
by northernexposure
Summary: When all is said done, there's really only one way for the future to start. (Sorry, deleted and reposted because the site lost my formatting, grr.)


**A/N:** Written as a tiny (not quite the right day in case you want to preserve your privacy!) birthday card for my lovely friend Ailtara. Here's wishing you all the love - and hope - in the world. And thanks, as always, to my other lovely friend MissyHissy3 for betaing.

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 **The Hope**

The parched dust sang with insects, with the crackle of tinder-dry grass underfoot as she moved. Kathryn Janeway hefted another hunk of wood onto the block, picked up the axe, stepped back and swung. The blade cut through the hot air, lifting her hair amid an artificial breeze as it described a perfect arc before sinking itself in the dead centre of the log, splitting it cleanly in two. She took a breath as the two halves fell to the ground, feeling the grim satisfaction of a hard job well done. It had taken months for her to get that right, to master something so simple and yet so demanding. Conquering the task had been her saviour, the long hours standing in this very spot, the sphere of her existence reduced to the rough-trodden circle between the chopping block and the woodpile, her horizon empty of anything but this.

A fly alighted on her bare shoulder and she shrugged it away with mild and familiar annoyance. It was the one thing she couldn't get used to out here, the incessant plague of flies. She'd managed to see her way to accepting everything else about living so remotely: to love it, even: learning the rhythms of the land and the animals that dwelt on it, how to read the huge skies with their infinite tells and tempers. As a younger woman the idea of staying in one place had always been an anathema to her. Why stay still when there was so much to see? What she had not realised was how much came to one who had the patience to stand and wait.

Janeway dropped the axe and went to the cabin's veranda to retrieve her pitcher of lemonade. A sound came to her, distant but growing louder, familiar but half forgotten. She realised what it was just a second or two before she saw the shape growing larger in the sky, man-made and metallic against the vaulted blue of her backdrop. She flinched, an involuntary reaction, and then cursed as the lemonade splashed over her hand. She put down the glass, shook her fingers and walked back down the steps into the sun, looking not at the approaching shuttlecraft but at the distant reaches of the atmosphere far above them both. She caught the faint stab of sunlight glinting against a hull made miniscule by distance, and felt her stomach clench, hard. _Voyager_? There was no way to tell from this distance, not with the naked eye, but it was doubtful.

She stood with her hands resting against her hips, as if the memory of that name and all it signified to her had taken her back in time. The sensation was not diminished by the figure that stepped out of the shuttlecraft. He was still tall, still broad-shouldered, though his face was now chiselled with more lines than the ones inked against his temple.

"Chakotay," she said. He was dressed in his captain's uniform, but she had no intention of using rank here.

"Kathryn."

She used one hand to shield her eyes from the sun, and wondered how long he had spent deliberating how to address her. Perhaps it had been contingent on how she had addressed him. It's what he would have done years ago, she thought, tactical in all his thinking. "You've got old," she told him.

He smiled, almost laughed, glanced at the ground with an expression so painfully familiar that her gut clenched again. _I don't want this_ , she thought. _I don't want any of this, whatever it is._

She turned away, abruptly. "What do you want, Chakotay?"

"I'll take a drink for starters."

Janeway glanced back over her shoulder to see him indicating the pitcher. She grunted, then went inside the cabin to retrieve another glass. By the time she came out again he was sitting on the steps and had removed his jacket. She poured him a drink, replenished her own glass, and dropped down beside him. They sat in silence, looking out into the endless sagebrush visible between the incongruous bulk of his shuttlecraft and the stand of wavering pines her predecessor had planted to thwart the northwest winds.

"What are you doing here, Kathryn?"

"I believe that should be my line."

He shook his head, a frown creasing more lines across his forehead. "This is the last place I'd ever expect to find you."

She scrubbed a nail against a non-existent spot on her glass. "Maybe that's the point."

They were silent again. She wondered how long it was since they'd last seen each other. Two years? Three? Not long enough and too long by far.

"I told you once," she said. "My ancestors were pioneers."

He shifted slightly, looking at her. "So – what? You're trying to regain the past?"

She didn't move her gaze from the horizon. "Trying to disappear into it, perhaps. The future didn't seem as if it was shaping up to be such a great place after all."

"This isn't like you."

"How would you know what is and isn't like me?"

"Seven years of standing by your side, Kathryn, watching you achieve the impossible. Seven years of seeing you do something – a million things – that no one else would even dare to attempt. Seven years of knowing a woman with a backbone so strong that not even a Borg could break it. You're not the type to quit. You're not the type to walk away. You don't know how."

She let out a puff of air, one palm lifting, indicating her self, her life. "And yet…"

"Living in a place like this, you're still fighting," he said. "You haven't quit, you've just shifted your horizon. Now you're just fighting for yourself. Why?"

Janeway swallowed hard, looking down at her drink. She was silent for a while, feeling the bulk of him beside her where an absence had been for too long for her to fathom.

"I spent so long trying to get us back here. Back _home_. Always holding up the rulebook, always living the way Starfleet taught me, always believing that was right. And what did we find when we got here? Not the Starfleet I remember. Not the _Federation_ I remember."

Chakotay nodded but said nothing, as if waiting for her to continue. She wondered what would happen if she said nothing more. How long would he sit there, waiting? How patient was he? But she already knew the answer to that, didn't she? Kathryn clunked her glass down beside her, irritable, wanting him gone, wanting it all gone.

"I need a rest, Chakotay. Is that too much to ask for?"

"Of course it isn't."

"Then what are you doing here?"

He turned his head to look at her again, his eyes scanning her face, her hair. She wondered what he saw there, beneath the dust of the hot day. New lines to match his, no doubt, as well as a deep tan that wouldn't have been there the last time they'd met.

"I nearly quit myself," he said. "Did you know that?"

She hadn't known, but she wasn't surprised.

Chakotay looked down at his feet. "I spent seven years living by Starfleet rules, but I didn't do it for them. I didn't even do it for myself. I did it for my crew. I did it for you. I didn't believe in Starfleet, Kathryn, not in the idealised way that you did. But I believed in you."

"Then why did you stay?" Her voice was even more hoarse than usual. She indicated his jacket, hanging on the post of her rickety veranda. "Why are you still in uniform?"

He reached down and picked up a small stone, weighing it in one hand before pitching it out into the dust. "Because maybe I'm wise enough now to realise I can do more inside that I can out. Or I can at least try, one last time. My new commission is humanitarian. We're going to help communities that are still ravaged after the Dominion war." Chakotay paused, turning towards her. "Any community, whether they're part of the Federation or not."

Janeway understood the magnitude of what he was saying. "Cardassians."

He looked away again with a nod, but said nothing. She watched his profile, admiration stirring in her chest. She wondered what it had cost him to decide this course of action. She wondered how many friends would no longer look him in the eye, no longer seek his company.

"I have to lead by example," he said, softly. "There are plenty who are calling for harsh measures, for Starfleet to press an advantage. But there has to be a better way. There has to be, or what's the future for?"

"Why are you here, Chakotay? What do you want from me?"

He rubbed a thumb across one eyebrow. "I want you to lead the fleet. There's just three ships, one of them mine. There are already rumblings – divisions, concerns. Pressures to use it as a spy mission, as a way to consolidating Starfleet control, arguments that we should be expending resources on more warships, not humanitarian efforts. It'll take a strong personality to make it work." He turned to her again.

She shook her head. "No. Not me."

"You've done it before, Kathryn. You can do it again."

"I can't, Chakotay. Seven years. Wasn't that enough?"

"No," he said, his bluntness stopping her dead. "Seven years was nothing. Out there we were doing what you're doing here. Fighting for survival. Fighting for ourselves. Fighting because we had no choice. Now it's time to fight for something bigger. Something better. That's the Starfleet you were thinking of all that time we were out there, isn't it? That's the Starfleet in your head. So now it's time to put that brilliance of yours to good use."

She looked away. "Three ships."

"It's more than we had in the Delta Quadrant."

Janeway looked up, scanning the clear blue sky until she found the ship in orbit above them. She wondered what her patch of land looked like from up there. She wondered which young eyes were on the rarefied air of that bridge, itching to see more interesting places, more interesting landscapes.

"What's she called?"

Chakotay leaned back, looking up at the distant vessel that gleamed in the air like a figment of the imagination, like the dream of someone from long ago but not too far away to matter. An idea of the future that might just have a chance to exist if only one were to believe in it and act accordingly.

"That's the _Hope_. I named her myself."

She almost laughed. "Of course you did."

"Want to know why I called her that?"

Janeway made a face. "No doubt there's a long story behind it…"

"Because I don't think there's anywhere that hope can't survive. And I don't think it's ever too late to hope for anything. Change might take a generation, but it all starts with hope."

They were both silent again for a while. Then Chakotay leaned forward on his elbows and dusted off his hands.

"I never learned to love anyone the way I loved you without even thinking about it," he said. "I should have told you that years ago."

She stood up and walked down the steps, stooping to pick up the pebble he'd tossed into the dust. She turned it over in her hand.

"Three ships," she said again.

"It's enough," he said. "It's a start. Isn't it? Come on, Kathryn. I need you. I need your hope, I need your heart, I need your fighting spirit. We all do. Not here. Out there. With me. With _us_. _For_ us. Maybe we can't fix everything. Maybe we'll run out of time trying. But we can make a start. If not us, then who?"

Janeway put the stone in her pocket before looking at him again.

"You and me, huh?"

He stood up. "Always."

"I'm flying the shuttle," she said. "You bring my axe."

[END]


End file.
